It was sixteen years ago that Kelly and I got married. It’s been a blast! I’m lucky to have met such a smart, confident, funny, and all around amazing woman. Oh, and good looking, too! I’m still hopelessly, goofily in love with her.
September 11, 2015
What Programmers Want | Michael O. Church
Interesting take on what motivates a software engineer. This is three years old but surprisingly relevant.
Most people who have been assigned the unfortunate task of managing programmers have no idea how to motivate them. They believe that the small perks (such as foosball tables) and bonuses that work in more relaxed settings will compensate for more severe hindrances like distracting work environments, low autonomy, poor tools, unreasonable deadlines, and pointless projects. They’re wrong. However, this is one of the most important things to get right, for two reasons. The first is that programmer output is multiplicative of a number of factors– fit with tools and project, skill and experience, talent, group cohesion, and motivation. Each of these can have a major effect (plus or minus a factor of 2 at least) on impact, and engineer motivation is one that a manager can actually influence. The second is that measuring individual performance among software engineers is very hard. I would say that it’s almost impossible and in practical terms, economically infeasible. Why do I call infeasible rather than merely difficult? That’s because the only people who can reliably measure individual performance in software are so good that it’s almost never worth their time to have them doing that kind of work. If the best engineers have time to spend with their juniors, it’s more worthwhile to have them mentoring the others (which means their interests will align with the employees rather than the company trying to perform such measurement) than measuring them, the latter being a task they will resent having assigned to them.
Gangs and kids
One morning last week, I was waiting with my kids in the middle school carpool line when I saw a 20-something adult on a bike ride by, dressed head to toe in gang colors. As I casually watched in the rear-view mirror, he started chatting up a teenage middle school student as the young man was walking to school.
I’m not sure what was said there, but I sure hope that the student has a good head on his shoulders and gave no thought to joining a gang. I’d like to find out how I can do more to keep kids from choosing this dead-end path. It got me thinking, anyway.
The Jet fuel; How hot did it heat the World Trade Center?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report into collapse of the WTC towers, estimates that about 3,500 gallons of jet fuel burnt within each of the towers. Imagine that this entire quantity of jet fuel was injected into just one floor of the World Trade Center, that the jet fuel burnt with perfect efficency, that no hot gases left this floor, that no heat escaped this floor by conduction and that the steel and concrete had an unlimited amount of time to absorb all the heat. With these ideal assumptions we calculate the maximum temperature that this one floor could have reached.
“The Boeing 767 is capable of carrying up to 23,980 gallons of fuel and it is estimated that, at the time of impact, each aircraft had approximately 10,000 gallons of unused fuel on board (compiled from Government sources).”
Quote from the FEMA report into the collapse of WTC’s One and Two (Chapter Two).
Since the aircraft were only flying from Boston to Los Angeles, they would have been nowhere near fully fueled on takeoff (the aircraft have a maximum range of 7,600 miles). They would have carried just enough fuel for the trip together with some safety factor. Remember, that carrying excess fuel means higher fuel bills and less paying passengers. The aircraft would have also burnt some fuel between Boston and New York.
“If one assumes that approximately 3,000 gallons of fuel were consumed in the initial fireballs, then the remainder either escaped the impact floors in the manners described above or was consumed by the fire on the impact floors. If half flowed away, then 3,500 gallons remained on the impact floors to be consumed in the fires that followed.”